Yes, it is an hourly fee. However, I always charge a half-day or full-day rate: the time you need to get to the studio, waiting time at the studio, preparations, etc. - all that eats into your time. So, while the recording itself may not take longer than 10 minutes, half your day may be gone, and the client will have to compensate you for that.

I do some radio voice-overs (commercials and stuff) and also voice-overs for corporate videos, etc., and in some cases, I\'m in and out the studio within 30 minutes or so. But if you add it all up, your whole morning or afternoon may have gone into this one project.

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I am working as a narrator for 21 years and have therefore quite some experience (exceeding 600 videos, 100 CD ROMs, dozens of TV commercials...)

Here in Japan, the hourly rate is very rare. I usually also refuse it, because it is not really a good yardstick. The better you are and the faster you can do the job, the less you get paid. On the other hand, if you have a bad technical crew with two left hands,you get paid more. That is not right. If the narrator is good, it saves costly studio time, and my clients know that.

I have two \"rules of thumbs\" for charging:

If I do the translation as well, I charge a flat fee per page, because I know by experience that one page equals about a video minute. And if I do the text myself, I know that it will fit into the time slots.

Or I charge by video minute (which is relatively rare), if I already get the text. I agree, this can be tricky, though. A minute is not a minute, but usually Japanese companies pay good narrators very generously, so I have no complaints.

I also have a minimum fee, because even if I have just one line and 5 minutes studio time for a commercial, it takes my time to get there.

And I give discounts on big or repetitive jobs, e.g. I do a CD ROM for a copier manufacturer twice or 3 times a year and I get a flat fee, if it is 40 or 60 pages text. As it comes again and again, it balances to a nice fee in total.

Unfortunately here in Japan the jobs are not that frequent. Most are handled by the subsidiaries of makers in the respective target markets.

[ This Message was edited by: on 2002-05-26 22:13 ]

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I think that *swissmiss* would have liked to have answered her first question, too. I am NOT very experienced in doing voice-overs, and I don\'t know the going rate. So I just indicate what I got exactly for the job I dit at home on my computer: 35$/h. Maybe this helps - or others, who know the rates better than me can tell us if this was an acceptable rate.

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